EVS and NBC team up for 'Football Night in America'

January 12, 2007

On any given Sunday, NBC served up to 16 football games simultaneously in addition to press conferences and other news feeds surrounding the events on the field. This meant a huge number of incoming feeds needed to be recorded, logged and edited before the studio highlight show "Football Night in America" went on the air.

The EVS XT[2] HD server is at the heart of the system, providing NBC with a fast and reliable way to record and edit the huge amount of material that made up the primetime sports highlights show each week. All of the feeds from around the country were brought into NBC headquarters in New York City and recorded on one of the 16 HD XT[2] servers that have been installed in the brand new state-of-the-art Digital Production Systems area used by NBC Sports.

Metadata describing the action on the field was created by a group of loggers using one of the 34 EVS IP Director suites. Sports producers are each equipped with their own individual IP Director browsing station to allow them to intelligently sort through the enormous amount of recorded material. This interconnected workflow allowed multiple producers to collaborate on the various pieces of the show.

For the producers and editors, using the EVS system meant that they didn't need to worry about where a feed was recorded. Once any server on the network captured it, it became available to any and all outputs simultaneously. All of the recordings were stored nearline on a giant 146TB storage array for future use, using the XStream application. The logs created every Sunday were also stored, allowing a producer to see exactly how a player performed during the entire season.

NBC Universal’s "Saturday Night Live" and "The Today Show" are now also using this new production workflow.